The London studio is mailing closed alpha keys to members of the game's Founder's Club. You can sign up at the official site.

To coincide with the announcement, Splash Damage has released a new video of Dirty Bomb showing new gameplay footage and Echo, Splash Damage's gameplay telemetry and analytics system.

Echo is made by Splash Damage's sister company Fireteam. Dave Johnston, of Counter-Strike map de_dust fame, is project lead. The proprietary technology uses cloud-based services to collect every event in every game session worldwide. Echo then visualizes this data for the developers so they can tweak balance, classes, skills, weapons, frame-rate and latency accordingly.

"At Splash Damage, we believe gamers should be able to enter a multiplayer game confident it's well balanced, compatible with their hardware and as bug free as possible," Splash Damage's Ed Stern says in the video.

"To achieve this we're launching the Dirty Bomb closed alpha today backed up by a cool new technology we call Echo."